By Lyn Hacker
NKyTribune Contributor
Whoa, temps in the low 40’s the end of May? I don’t know. Can we finally put in our gardens, and hope a killer frost doesn’t mow down our newly planted, tender plants? Maybe. If you are an intrepid soul and do plan to shop for plants this weekend, one big consideration might be, how about feeding our pollinators?
Pollinators in America include many flying insects, from the Monarch butterfly to the honeybee. Worldwide there are 20,000 species of bees alone. Nonetheless they are in danger due to many causes, including insecticides, herbicides, and loss of habitat.
According to an article published by the Penn State Department of Agriculture, “worldwide, more than 200,000 species of pollinators play a role in the reproduction process for about 75% of all flowering plant species (NRC, 2007) (USFWS, 2009).” As most people know, most pollinators visit flowers only for nectar, a sugar solution, while exploiting other protein resources. In their wanderings, they “unknowingly, but efficiently,” vector pollen from flower to flower, known as pollination. It’s critical to the sexual reproduction of flowering plants.
Honeybees themselves have their own issues besides those above, including diseases and insects that plague them. Since they are largely responsible for ensuring our vegetable and fruit crops, we need to help them out as much as possible. As mentioned above, one huge problem affecting them is their loss of habitat, so enter the pollinator garden, in many different forms. We can help by planting flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, and trees in containers, yards, hedges, highway divides and on farms. And, as it turns out, it’s not just the type and quantity of habitat forage, it’s the variety.
By the way, simply providing fresh water for them, especially in the heat of summer, is a big help in itself. Take a shallow, glass pie pan, fill it with clean pebbles, and keep fresh water in it. The pebbles give the bees and butterflies a safe place to land and drink.
One of the earliest and most prolific forages is, yes, the humble dandelion. Don’t be so quick to spear this bright fluff of yellow on your lawns. Besides being one of the first sources of food for foragers, dandelions are great additions to our diets. They can be made into nutritious teas and the greens and flowers are excellent, tasty sources of vitamin C added to salads. (I recently ran across a neat recipe for dandelion butter cookies). If you can’t abide their speckled presence in your lawns, consider giving them an area to grow, in peace, on their own. But please don’t shower them with poisons.
Clover is great for planting in your lawn and is a great forage for pollinators. Not only is it attractive, it comes in many different varieties, including white, yellow, red and crimson, to mention just a few. Contrary to popular belief, red clover (the purplish colored puffballs) are not great honeybee forage (because the bees’ tongues aren’t long enough to get to the nectar), but they are good for butterflies. Crimson, white and yellow clover, though, is excellent.
Sunflowers are excellent for pollinator forage, and they come in a gazillion varieties. You can plant the giant ones along a fence line and harvest tasty sunflower seeds in the fall. You can eat them yourself or feed to the birds over winter. Other varieties, especially planted in a mix, are great for cut flower arrangements, and for bringing those striking bunches of color to your garden. Other annuals (that can be perennials) are asters, buttercups, hollyhocks, calendula, poppies, heliotrope. Other perennials are cat mint, roses, anemone, sweet alyssum, and of course the beloved cone flower.
Planting for dual purposes always makes sense, especially if it provides you with food. Shannon Trimboli, biologist at Mammoth Cave National Park, recommends non-weedy, non-invasive plants like thyme, catnip, most mints, bee balm, black and blueberries and strawberries. Berries, of course, will also attract birds. Other herbs like lavender, chamomile, sage, fennel, thyme, borage, and cilantro also serve double purposes as food for pollinators and your family. A postage orchard planting will also provide plenty of bloom and fruit.
Planting for wildlife does not mean turning your lawn into an unattractive, weedy expanse.
Consider a grouping of Kentucky flowering natives in an artistic design on one side of your lawn or the other, or in scattered groups, perhaps circled by some native stone. You might consider choosing one plant of each species (tree, bush, flower, grass), per year to build your lawn into a pollinators’ paradise. There’s not enough room here to advise you what to plant, but you can brainstorm some ideas.
Dr. Tammy Horn, Kentucky’s State Beekeeper, who has done a great deal of work helping reclaim mined land in Southeastern Kentucky, likes to stress the concept of “three season foraging.” This insures a constant forage of flowering plants, (flowers, trees, grasses, bushes, and vegetables), that will offer nectar laden blooms for the bees throughout the growing season. One can become a real artist, taking their little patch of lawn and orchestrating it into a living, summer-long pollinator feeding station. Getting the kids involved in choosing, planting and maintaining your plants will teach them lifelong lessons about biology, ecology, food and nutrition, all at the same time. Suffice it to say, lay off the herbicides and insecticides, or use organic solutions.
If this sounds interesting to you, you can avail yourself of all the resources from our local beekeeping societies, as well as our university and college professors. One on-line place that sells native plants includes the homepage of the Kentucky Native Plants Society. Consider a family visit to the Saluto Wildlife Center in Frankfort to visit their gardens of native plants.
Goudsbloem, calendula
A lot of people buy their bedding plants, flowers and veggies, from large box stores, which have come under fire by selling plants that are treated with neonicatoids or “neonics.” These substances have been implicated, along with other factors, in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a situation that is causing major honeybee losses across the nation. They are important enough that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced genetically engineered crops (GMOs) and bee-toxic pesticides will be banned in National Wildlife Refuges.
This ruling impacts more than 150 million acres of federal land. Our president has even seen fit to set up a pollinator health task force to further study the situation. Losses of bee populations historically hovered around 10 percent, but recently they are around 30 to 40 percent, and more. Now they’re being tracked by the EPA.
The question of neonics has taken some interesting turns. According to an article on Weather.com, some scientists think the bees themselves, develop an addiction to plants containing neonics. In studies, they’ve found bees prefer to forage plants containing neonics, or insecticides chemically related to nicotine, which is leading to their declining numbers, a new study out of the United Kingdom recently published in the journal Nature says.
Researchers began to notice a colony collapse disorder (CCD) or an interference with a bee’s ability to effectively communicate and navigate actions critical to a colony’s survival, an article in Chemistry World added. Further research showed a surprising loss of appetite in the bees, but that the bees were unable to control their consumption of nectar from these neonic-laced plants. Even further research showed sucrose solutions containing the neonics didn’t stimulate the neurons used to distinguish good from harmful food. They also made the bees’ sense of taste useless by not stopping those neurons from firing. In other words, the bees weren’t alerted to anything odd, and so grazed the forage the nenoics were used on without concern.
Not everyone believes neonics are a problem, though. Jon Entine, a contributor to Forbes, reported in a 2014 article, “A joint report issued by scientists affiliated with USDA and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences concluded that honeybee deaths (and likely bumblebee deaths as well) stem from the tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), not from pesticides. It’s long been known that foraging bees pick up the virus; what’s new is that researchers discovered that the virus has evolved the ability to infect bees, and it now attacks their nervous systems. TRSV then spreads to other bees — a process known as ‘host shifting’ — by the mites that feed on them.” He went on to say that mites then become infected and pass the virus on to the bees that way. He also criticized other studies saying the amount of neonics the bees were exposed to in the studies were not realistic.
Beekeepers all over Kentucky, I’m sure, are happy and looking forward to some good science and answers from the president’s new commission. Until then, some good news: According to Kaye Kittrell, in a blog, several of the major box stores have been feeling the pressure and are at least requiring their suppliers to now label those plants treated neonics. And by the way, you can relax about the beloved “Bonnie” plants – a station manager for their company, Wesley Pennington, assured Walker no neonics were used on their plants.
It seems like news about neonics, as well as bee losses and CCD, surfaces every other day, so I try to keep it simple – I simply go organic.
As an elder gardener, it’s my preference to plant things that are perennial, and require little upkeep. I’m perfectly happy with the same old, same old, year after year. But there are plenty of options in annuals if you want to change it up. Every year I try to add one more bush or flower to my plant family. This year I’ve been eyeing a lilac. I keep water out for the bees and butterflies. Anything you can do to help probably will. I’m sure the pollinators appreciate it. It is a simple little something that everyone can do, and where there’s a will, there’s a way, as long as that late frost doesn’t get you!
Lyn Hacker is a Lexington native raised by Appalachian parents to be not only educated but proficient in the living arts – working very hard, playing music, growing gardens, hog farming, orchard management and beekeeping. The UK graduate has been a newspaper staff writer and production manager, a photography lab manager, a Thoroughbred statistics manager, a Bluegrass singer and songwriter, a registered respiratory therapist, a farmer, a Standardbred horsewoman, a Red Barn Radio promoter and a beekeeper. She lives on a farm in Sadieville.
